At 03:03 PM 3/17/00 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
"Growing" here means probably about one new type
every week or so. This greatly reduces the power of the word "burden".
I think we have fundamental disagreements here about how many XML
vocabularies are in development today, and how many will be in development
in the future. Maybe I should do a survey on Robin Cover's site for
vocabulary emergence frequency, keeping in mind that this incredibly
comprehensive site represents a subset.
(http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ - BizTalk's probably worth exploring as
well, and there are more..)
Remember, this is only of interest to specialized systems, that is, the
ones who want to pass random (that is, unknown format) XML to a generic XML
parser.
I think we have another fundamental disagreement here. Such 'specialized
systems' are already distributed by the millions, in the forms of IE 5 and
Mozilla. Right now, they have pretty limited capabilities, but they're a
start.
Agents, that collapsed dream of a few years ago, are another likely
returning possibility that will also have the needs of these 'specialized
systems'.
Add to that a number of folks out there implementing general architectures
for XML interchange and processing, some of them with plans for every
desktop a processor, and I think there are more than a few search engines
in the room.
Yes, that's "distributed"... over a very small number of systems
that wan to do this. Even if it is many systems, the cost of sniffing one
new document type a week is incredibly low, and is only incurred in systems
where there is not a human who updates the type-to-translation table.
I think we're at odds on the fundamentals, but I think the cost your vision
is imposing on my vision is rather dramatically greater than the cost my
vision imposes upon your vision.
Should be a fun weekend of discussion!
Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com